Thursday, May 19, 2011

Control Education, Control Society

Parts of what follow are from “The Patriot Post” received today. The point of the piece is to mount an attack on Obama and his policies. But in all fairness, this is not just about Obama. Plenty of ‘conservatives’ want the state to control most education.

According to the Communist Party Education Workers Congress, "We must create out of the younger generation a generation of Communists. We must turn children, who can be shaped like wax, into real, good Communists. ... We must remove the children from the crude influence of their families. We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them. From the first days of their lives they will be under the healthy influence of Communist children's nurseries and schools. There they will grow up to be real Communists."

So far, this effort has generally been successful. That is not to imply that everything and everyone involved in the governments schools are overtly Communist. But the worldview that prevails in Departments of Education around our country are generally in line with the aims of many varieties of socialism.

Benjamin Disraeli, the conservative 19th-century British prime minister, noted, "Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery." His contemporary, John Stuart Mill, warned, "A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body."

As long as we continue to allow the state to be the main providers and controller of education, we can never hope to recover from the current statist, socialist bent our society.